BETWEEN THE LINES

Rachel Dolezal -- the left's gift that keeps giving

Joseph Farah is founder, editor and chief executive officer of WND. He is the author or co-author of 13 books that have sold more than 5 million copies, including his latest, "The Restitution of All Things: Israel, Christians, and the End of the Age." Before launching WND as the first independent online news outlet in 1997, he served as editor in chief of major market dailies including the legendary Sacramento Union.

I don’t know about you, but I’m delighted that Rachel Dolezal is back in the news, saying she’s returning to leftist racial activism.

In case you forgot, she’s the 39-year-old former NAACP leader ousted after being unmasked as a white woman in 2015 after years of claiming to be black.

“I definitely feel like in America … there still is a line drawn in the sand, there still are sides,” she said. “Politically, there is a black side and a white side. And I stand unapologetically on the black side.”

Rachel Dolezal

Even though she is the daughter of two white parents, she is insisting that she is black person, regardless of her birth circumstances and genealogy. She’s the author of a new book, “Now In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World.”

“I don’t identify as African-American; I identify as black,” she says, “so I’m part of the pan-African diaspora. I stand with my own sense of the self and my internal values. And I also stand with the greater cause of challenging the myth of white supremacy.”

Could she fight for that cause without pretending to be black?

“I really prefer to just be exactly who I am, and black is really the closest race and cultural category, descriptive term that represents the essential essence of who I am,” she insists.

And why shouldn’t she in this crazy, mixed-up world today in which the left says you can be whatever you want to be simply by identifying as such?

If you were born a girl but identify as a boy, so be it.

If you were born a boy but identify as a girl, be one.

You can be whatever you want to be because it’s all a state of mind anyway.

Yet, it was the left that drummed Dolezal out of the NAACP – even though the NAACP was an organization largely founded by white people, supported by white people, overseen by white people in its earliest days.

The left also abandoned her completely after she was unmasked as white. Dolezal had trouble finding a job. She was rejected, dejected, suspected and neglected.

Again, you have to ask yourself why – from a logic and consistency viewpoint.

Is the left still making up its rules?

Why is it normal and even commendable to claim a different sex from the one nature bestowed upon you, but absolutely dead-wrong and perhaps even exploitative to assume a different racial identity?

I’ll tell you why.

Because playing racial politics is so deeply ingrained in leftist ideology and Democratic Party strategy that it would threaten the left’s tenuous grasp for power.

That’s why.

So don’t expect consistency or logic in the left’s rules.

Black and brown folks might not like it if white folks started passing for brown or black.

That’s what happened when Rachel Donezal had a close encounter with the illogic and inconsistency of the left.

The book was way ahead of its time, published, as it was, in 2010. It’s still very much worth a read to understand all this craziness. It goes a long way toward explaining why there are still slightly different rules as to how the left has preferred races – and maybe even why Rachel Donezal wants to be black even though she’s not.